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In a recent class report there appears the following quotation: "I would like also to declare for a more leisurely life while we are here, a life fuller of quiet reading and discussion, more like that in the English universities. We are all too busy. Some are overburdened with political or social duties, others are hard at work in athletics, a few work overmuch at their books, while the great body of the class drifts along from day to day, doing its appointed tasks mechanically well enough but doing very little thinking. I would like to see fewer distractions in the way of outside interests, fewer clubs, less serious athletics, less social scrambling, and more of the good old leisurely ripening under the influence of good books, intelligent friends, and inspiring teachers. We have lost the Humanities once and for all, but with them has gone much that made us well educated gentlemen instead of bustling embryo business men."
A better criticism of our life could hardly be made. It is useless to attempt to prove that only a certain few at the head of undergraduate affairs are the busy ones. We are all, with only a few exceptions, overcrowded with more or less useless "interests and activities," a phase which strangely enough never seems to include intellectual development. And the remedy will only come when we realize that there is more to be got from a College course than will result from the scattered existence which most of us now lead at Cambridge.
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